If you run an ecommerce website and notice orders seem unusually slow today, it could be that payments are not being properly processed. Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Amazon, and other companies who have cut off service to Wikileaks have suffered attacks on their websites by the groups 4chan and “anonymous” who are using Direct Denial of Service Attacks to slow or halt web operations at these companies. Denial of Service, also known as a DOS attack or ddos, works by creating tens of thousands or sometimes millions of simultaneous connections to a website, overwhelming it and causing it to slow down or fail.

Mastercard has been the most recent victim of this attack, as the group 4chan has been confirmed to have brought their website down completely, and there are unconfirmed reports that payment processing has also been affected. Paypal and Amazon have also been attacked by a group calling itself Anonymous, but so far have been able to withstand the attacks.

Using ddos against a website is illegal in most countries, but it can be difficult to stop since it often involves thousands of computers that are typically across several international boundaries or on separate networks.

Fortunately our customers are given protection from this sort of attack. We use a variety of threat identification tools, redundancy, and connection throttling to ensure our websites work reliably. Our systems employ a content delivery network that separates our systems geographically, so that an attack from one area of the world does not affect web performance in another geographic zone. We also detect unusual activity such as large numbers of requests or unusual requests from computers and check each computer’s connection against a variety of databases to determine if it has a good or bad reputation online. If all else fails, we use a throttling mechanism that reduces the load on our servers by turning off non-essential services. We then offload content onto backup servers to handle the added load. We even keep regular backups on and offsite to get things back up and running in the case of a hardware failure or natural disaster.

There are some things money can’t buy, but secure reliable hosting can be found at GainesvilleComputer.com. When you use Gainesville Computer you can be confident your website will continue at peak performance even under the most stressful conditions the net has to offer!